www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/03/07/robert-reynolds-on-trumps-release-of-jfk-files/

http://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com

http://www.jfkarc.info

I say:

If you believe most Conspiracy media, you’d think the same people who theoretically got away with killing the President left conclusive evidence of their crimes in locked off files.
The same blood thirsty super villains that are said to have murdered witnesses, confiscated and either edited or suppressed all the photos and documents that might reveal the truth of the conspiracy, didn’t destroy the incriminating material in the files?

The sealed off files have the names of the government agents who conducted the investigation(s) and THAT needs to be kept secret!

TRANSCRIPT:

Noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak, on the trail of delusion and Oliver Stones film flam-the demagogue of Dealey Plaza F

red Litwin is here he’s a longtime author and certainly Watcher of politics

joining us

Fred Litwin great to have you here

thank you very much

so welcome to another edition of on the trail of delusion where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and actually try to give you something sub stal on the jfk assassination rather than the usual crap that you find on the internet or on YouTube and so I’m really delighted once again to have my friend Robert Reynolds here to discuss the JFK assassination files there is no other expert no other person on this planet who knows as much about the assassination files as Robert Reynolds and so it’s just a delight to have him to have him with us once again this is his second appearance on the trail of delusion so welcome Robert well it’s great to be here Fred I’ve really been trying to get back for another for another go around and working hard well you you’ve been really busy I mean you have posted some absolutely important very important articles on your blog which will be linked to Below in the notes um so anyways why don’t you lead it off and tell us a bit about the files okay um uh I guess the best way I can do that is sort of introduce how I got involved in this and and it’s the simplest explanation is I started a Blog um after I had read some of the first files that were released from Nara in 2017 and um been doing that for I guess almost over seven years almost eight now and so that’s what I do and I guess that’s why I’m here um so maybe I can um perhaps give people a a general introduction to the subject a really quick one um so the blog I run is called the JFK Arc doino and um it’s basically a series of occasional notes about the JFK assassination records collection and hence the name of the block and what is that um the JFK assassination records collection which I will from now on call The Arc is the US government’s primary collection of Records on the assassination of President Kennedy it also includes all the records they’ve got on the multiple ass investigations of the assassination and a bunch of stuff on the Cold War background uh the collection was established by the JFK act which is a law passed by Congress in 1992 and this law gave final custody of the records to the National Archives and Records Administration

which I’ll call narrow from now on uh the JFK act also created a limited term Federal board called the assassination records review board which I’ll call the AR arrb and the arb’s function was to secure review and oversee release of all those records so by the time the board closed up shop in 1998 uh it had put more than 300,000 records in the collection about 88% of them released in full and so already we get these technical terms that are such a pain in the butt to explain um but basically uh Records are not Pages um call them do documents or even uh collections of documents sometimes they’re not even documents there are things like recordings or photographs the release is a very tricky term but here let’s just say it means um you can see everything in the records if they are released in full everything is there for you to see there’s nothing that’s been left out right um so 88% were released in full what does that mean it means 12% of the arc records were not released in full how come the JFK act allowed for postponing sensitive government and personal information in the records up until a final release date of 26 October 2017 and this is not a random number this is 25 years after the bill was signed into law as soon as the law was passed um it had this provision which allowed departments bureaus and a agencies which provided the records um to request redactions subject to a caseby case review by the arrb now redaction is another one of these technical terms redacting refers to removing information usually text okay that’s the vast majority of the collection uh removing text from a document and replacing it with a holder um that indicates something has been removed okay they’re not permanently removing it they’re removing it from the copies that they make public and the arc uses currently uses a blank box as a holder so one blank box indicates one redaction okay and that’s how we count count boxes now it’s not quite that simple but it’s pretty close so um even though the arrb had very strict um guidelines about what what they would let people redact um 12% of the records met their strict criteria and um as a result they were these portions of these records sometimes a whole record was held back for periods of time ranging from a few years I.E maybe 1995 up until 1997 uh all the way up until October 2017 which is the final release date but even before October 2017 Nara had already begun releasing some of the information previously held back they did this obviously with the consent of the agencies that were processing all this stuff um and the first one of first big release of this was in uh July 2017 and want went there were repeated releases of uh information that had been redacted previously redacted stuff from 2017 all the way up until 2023 and even after all this uh there is still a small number of Records today that have portions held back exactly how much information is still held back and how significant is this information for people who are interested in the JFK assassination that’s the kind of questions that interest me and that’s what I write about in the blog now a lot of people have been uh talking about this regular news um on the YouTube on podcasts and all these places since president Trump signed an executive memo which ordered senior government officials to come up with a plan to release the stuff that was held back in the arc what can I say it was clear even before the election that he was going to do something like this and so I started working on my project uh in December and I’ve been working on this for about three months now going over all the redacted records yet again not the first time I’ve done this but I’m doing this in agonizing detail this time every last page um to come up with my own wish list that I’m gonna send to Trump and ask him if he can please get these out right away and that’s that’s what I’ve been doing and so the stuff that you mentioned is up on the web page uh the probably the most useful one for people who care about this maybe not not even that interesting subject is a an Excel sheet that lists all of the currently redacted CIA records in the arc and it gives things like um how many redactions there are remember redactions are the boxes blank boxes that of thing so how how many CIA documents are there that that have redaction still in in in the collection I originally said uh 1484 but it looks like it’s down to 1482 these numbers go down um and I you know I I I feel like I should justify why they’re they they weren’t right the first time and the thing is that I use the postponement documents that the Departments and agencies sent to uh president Trump and to the National Security Council that give these documents give detailed lists of all the records that they say uh we still want to keep some stuff held we still want to hold some stuff back in these records uh Records are identified by record numbers and sometimes they’re called riff numbers because RI is an abbreviation for Reader information form which is the finding Aid that all every record has staple to it or on top of it actually not even that um but now we’re getting into the details that I talk too much about okay so so you have these uh 1500 documents so you’ve gone through you know what’s in those redactions I mean tell tell us a bit about you know we you could tell from the document as what kind of redactions are there so what what are what are what’s been redacted in those documents they they have they were required all of the agencies that want to do this are required to tell people what kind of stuff they’re holding back and to explain why they want to do this and they they have to give a schedule for when they’re actually finally going to release them if they can’t tell people a date then they have to at least tell them how often they’re going to look at them again and see if they can let them out now so um I call these explanations of what’s being held back I call them redaction categories and the CIA has three types of redaction categories um but they they mix sometimes especially in the long complicated documents um you get mixt of them the three three types are people uh information relating to people uh information relating to locations and information that’s CIA locations okay they’re not going to try and hide hellsinki or something like that um but the CIA had and perhaps has a Station in Helsinki and they don’t want that released or they didn’t um and that’s a complicated story about why they didn’t but that’s they felt that’s very important and there’s still locations of CIA facilities that are held back and finally the third detail is called operational details as you can imagine this is pretty complicated but um it turns out that this time around there’s probably the the thing that struck me that I’m seeing now that I didn’t see in the earlier releases is they releasing cover details and when the CIA stations people overseas outside the country they they can’t just put up a sign that says CIA you know apply for weapons here or CIA spill your guts here they can’t do that they have to have some sort of cover and this is not just the CIA this is every country in the world that have an intelligence agency does this and so uh different kinds of cover um most of them are official cover meaning that they have some official government status right obviously State Department is a very important one uh you US military can provides cover for CIA officers and then there’s non-official covers which if you watch Mission Impossible you know that these guys are called knock officers non-official cover officers and there’s the knock list good God is there really a knock list you gotta be kidding me there’s not a knock list and I got up put a list of all this stuff together um but but they do have um you know this this kind of cover and um they’re particularly tight mouthed about that obviously some of them are business Commercial cover deep commercial cover is a phrase that’s been released okay so when you go through you know when you I mean you can go and look at all these documents anybody can go look at these documents now and see for themselves what’s redacted for for the large part most of them you could read almost the entire document and get a real good feel for what’s in there yeah okay so um first let’s uh let me just mention that um I’m distinguishing in my on my blog and when I talk about it I try and distinguish between two basic ways of holding stuff back number one I call withheld withheld documents means you can’t see it period but there is B basic metadata information about the document how many pages who does it belong to What’s the title uh who is it from who is it to Etc okay and there are 515 records that are withheld right and there 499 of them are income tax returns and the reason is that the JFK act says you we don’t we we let the United States tax code U forbids the release of personal uh income tax returns and we want you to continue that in the collection so that’s that um in fact some of them can come out if the people concerned were to sign an agreement and this gets into a this is a specialized subject I’ll just leave it there right every else in the collection is

released 99% of the collection is released in full that is there is nothing held back 99% is a lot yeah okay and I mean it is hundreds of thousands of things and the total amount of records that have something held back in them is my estimate was at first uh 2544 2544 that number has gone down it’s probably really close to about 2,500 right why because I was looking at the documents the ageny sent to the NSC and as they’re sending in those documents they they have a deadline right where they have to send in the document but they kept on looking at the stuff later and they were actually release stuff after they sent in those documents because they were under severe pressure to get this stuff out okay so that that’s uh like for example I found another 1520 NSA documents that were released in full that they said you know we’re applying for we want to redact these still and then they decided no we’re going to release that stuff so um in those documents that have redactions um the question is how much are they holding back right yeah and so looking we’re looking at boxes that’s one thing how big is the box that tells you they’re holding something small or big back and then how many boxes that’s that’s the other thing right and so um the biggest box you can have is what I call a whole page redaction that is to say there’s a box on the page and that’s basically all you get it’s a little tricky because sometimes they put like a page number on it okay right or there’s a stamp at the top says top secret don’t tells and uh you know that that’s still that’s still a whole patod action right uh but some of them there’s really it’s really a messy border right a lot of the FBI documents have like a title at the end a very short title at the top of the page right Memo from Belmont okay is it is it and then you have no idea what Belmont said right everything that Belmont said is gone but you have you know at that page Memo from Belmont and then nothing else not even a page number and so those that’s that’s the biggest kind of redaction you can get right and uh the number

one record for whole page redactions is an FBI record that has I don’t know okay because it’s it’s so it’s extensive right it’s a 1,400 plus page record um that was part of the FBI’s administrative file for the church committee and of those 1417 Pages 350 of them have redacted have redactions and I would say that they’re probably close to 200 pages that are whole page redactions that’s the biggest one however um This Record has nothing whatsoever to do with the JFK assassination which is uh I’ll I’ll back it up if we want to talk about this later right in fact most of these records are they are class they are labeled um by the agencies that contributed them they are labeled either NBR or n uh not believed re relevant or not assassination related and um the vast majority of them are are that kind of record yeah and hasn’t hasn’t tonim said that basically all the assassination related documents are really out there um here’s what he said okay this is an important point that I don’t think that I emphasized the last time I was on so I’m gonna I have a I have my script to read here okay so uh the ARB was determined to release before went out of business they were determined to release any and all records judged Central to the assassination story and they said we did it there’s the board members staff or members have always vigorously defended their perform their record in this regard and so tun uh John tunan who was the chair of the ARB uh told Vincent bugliosi who in his massive book buosi said what else is in there there’s got to be some goodies in there and he said the board protected IE released uh held back excuse me protected I.E held back nothing not one document or page that was centrally related to the facts of the assassination itself so that’s you know that’s not obviously they held back 12% right and then and he didn’t you know I feel like you don’t quite get an idea of the scale of how much was hold back 12% of course is is a small percentage but remember there are five million pages so it was a lot right and the first set of releases in 2017 um release a bunch of stuff and Trump said uh you know I people were you know giving him a hard time about this when the stuff started coming out he said I didn’t mean it that way I meant it you know really get it out there and so they did it again they took a six-month break they took they took another six month to go over everything that they had said we’re going to hold back again and they released a bunch more stuff another 5,000 plus records and by the time they got through with this it was a substantially reduced he heap of paper that they were holding back um in 2021 Biden said we’re g to start releasing this stuff guys you know first put out the stuff that you know you’ve decided you don’t want even want the hassle of writing about it okay and so they released another 1500 records then 2022 they released a lot of Records okay many of them were short redactions just single page records um but it it really killed a lot of it and by the end of 2022 they said basically we have

it’s in different parts okay this is the postponement documents but say there were 4,500 pages right um then in 2023 they started releasing more right and and one reason there’s some confusion about this is because people are not really didn’t really go over the 2023 releases close enough but we do have the postponement documents which give us exact numbers for what was left at the end of 2022 except that sometimes you know even more is gone right and so this is you know going over this in agonizing detail is how I figure out where where stuff is held back and where it’s not I mean it’s incredibly boring and it’s bad for your eyesight I I spent 5 hours today going over a 1444 page FBI document I knew it it’s really explicit there’s nothing in here that has anything to do with JFK right and and uh but it there’s redactions okay how many redactions 1,444 pages there are four Social Security numbers redacted in this

document I spent five hours going through it my eyes felt like they were bleeding at the end I’ve been over it twice um I’m pretty sure that maybe I missed one okay right big hairy deal I missed one social security number in 1400 pages that is not unusual for the documents that we’re looking at so so but you know so T I’m said you we we’ve released all the assassination related records do you think there’s still assassinated amongst the redactions are are are many of them actually related to the assassination or any of them or do we know I believe I believe that I mean I’ve looked at this okay I bear in mind what tunheim said to buosi uh nothing was held back that was centrally related to the facts of the assassination itself I I believe that’s true right pretty cl to true now um related to the investigations of the assassination yes there was and last time we talked I said they they held back a bunch of stuff I said that more than once but I wasn’t talking about the facts of the assassination okay so take it back quick and uh um I mean some of the things that were one reason that people were dissatisfied with the investigation is that some of the you know how do you know that right Oswald visited the Russian Embassy in Mexico City uh four weeks six weeks how long was it like six weeks before he he shot Kennedy how do you know that right that’s a question that everyone wanted to ask and they refused to say until uh the hsca they started having newspaper stories about how they had a telephone tap but they still didn’t say how do you get the telephone T and uh it’s only in 2018 that we finally find out that um the CIA had a very close liaison relationship with the Mexican Government and they actually did joint operations including tapping the telephones of the Russian Embassy and this is something that they would they you know pounded their heads and didn’t want to do that and the the ARB was going to make him do that in 1998 and the state department finally you know submitted a memo saying well if you do that our estimate is that the Mexican Government will fall so don’t do that theb said oh well all right and so they were in a very difficult situation and ton heim’s words in that statement to buosi is he’s thinking exactly of that facts of the assassination itself now facts of the investigation some things were held back because how do you know that’s investigation right yeah and I you know I’ve been struck I’ve I’ve gone through I mean I you know I don’t have the time to go through every document but when I do go through some of those CIA documents I’m always struck by the fact that I can read the whole document and and like a city is is redacted in the distri ution list right like but I but I can see the whole document I mean a few years ago somebody sent me a Clay Shaw document that had just been released and and I was very excited oh Clay Shaw document and I opened it up and I said well I’ve seen this before and the only thing that was now unredacted was the name of the CIA agent who wrote it right so um and this is um very much the arrb style and um um it’s it’s actually they’re actually doing what the CIA asked them to do they said don’t don’t tell don’t make us publish the names of people who work here if it’s people who are you know acknowledged administrative heads of the CIA yes now in England they they didn’t used to do this who is the head of MI5 who who is the head of MI6 right don’t no no no we’re not going to tell you that and if you attempt to publish that in your newspaper we’re going to send you a d notice yeah yeah if you ignore the D

notice not good now Americans don’t believe in D notices and nothing like that and besides they have to have you know the CIA heads to come in front of of Congress so they can rre them over the cols yeah um these other guys the sorry the the officers who are stationed abroad cannot be identified unless you want to make sure that they never go abroad again right so it’s there were very explicit cases the hsca was going to identify this one CIA officer who had just been assigned I think it was to Germany he had been he was one of the people who questioned nenko right and they wanted they wanted to get this down because they were very unhappy the way nenko a Soviet Defector was treated and he said if you do that then my career is over and so they they finally said okay we won’t do that and uh a lot of these people were there was one guy Tom Flores who who was who after he retired he lived in Venezuela but he was the head of the cia’s Cuban force and you know he there were there were lots of these guys yeah I know that guy he see them and so he got a letter from CIA saying ARB is looking at all this stuff and they’re going to publish some stuff and some of it has your name on it and he said I’ll see you in court um because it was a it was not just a matter of okay whatever you say it was a a a legal deal and if you if you cause me this kind of problem I’m not just going to sit back and take it and it turns out that there’s I’ve seen at least one document where it’s a guy actually whose name got spilled actually got got compensated so that kind of thing is held back right and I I remember seeing some documents in the ARB from I think it was a John Witten who uh a CIA guy who uh had a student in my John skelo I think and he had written the ARB saying uh well you know I’m I’m I’ve immigrated I think to Mexico and and if you release some of the stuff with my name I they may determine I lied on my immigration forms and you’re going to cause me a lot awful lot of problems well he was he made he made a big stink he was in he was in Vienna though and uh he he it was they actually sent people to talk to him to interview him and uh it was towards the end they felt really bad because I mean it was his situation was tough and you know what better way to totally screw someone’s someone someone up right yeah so tell me a bit about uh you you you got all the freedom of access information about um what’s happened under the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration about uh the releases and and you’ve put a lot of documents up on your website uh for people to see so tell us a little bit about um the whole process and what you learned in from your Freedom of Information Act yeah right okay this is um this was a a a request that was actually filed by Larry schnap and but uh couldn’t he he he didn’t send us anything so um max Holland uh submitted a request to a foyer request to Nara and said could you please send me everything you sent Larry snap right and they said why sure Max and they sent everything they sent they sent Larry so um um uh and Max said take a look at this and you know see what you think and it was very interesting um I didn’t see any of the Biden stuff but it was very clear from the documentation that Biden released that they they didn’t change anything they did it the same way um so there is this um component it was done in NC and um I I don’t know what people think NSC is but NSC is belongs to the president and they do what he says and it would never occur to someone to not do what he says they’re there to do what the President says and sometimes they get in big trouble for it but they do it anyway right right this is where Oliver North was yeah yeah he says he’s doing the stuff on your own well wait a minute right right uh so so but there are a bunch of people there it’s a big thing it’s sort of the president’s buffer with these other gigantic federal agencies and they’re there to crack the whip and make those guys because they’re executive agencies and so they do what the President says and the NSC is there to crack the whip that’s it and so the documents um were I mean they were Nara documents essentially but the there was at least one person from Nara copied on all of these documents which was 99% well they were all emails but they all had a t a lot of them had attachments that gave us the documents that were very basic interesting important and so it turns off it turns out that Nara was uh was on it from the beginning they they wanted this stuff out they were very dubious of many claims of this stuff being too important to release and they um brought in NSC and told them what they so these guys have to review their records they’re going to release this or not and they then you have to send us the stuff if you’re going to release and you’re not going to release and tell us why right and so and so that that’s their review and they have to send this to the NSC and the NSC gives it to Nara and Nara gives it to their team and their team knows this stuff and they look at and say no no no no that’s not that’s not what the JFK Acts says uh no no no no that’s not what the arrb decided uh so that’s not that’s not going to work out and sometimes it was just you know so you say that you’ve got to withheld all this but how come you’ve already released these names like 20 times what are you doing you know did you not look at what you had released before please and so um they were polite to the FBI um they were very blunt to the CIA I mean they had nothing but bad things to say to the CIA about the way they did it which is which is correct the cia’s releases in 2017 were crap and they gave them six months to go back over them again and they did indeed throw out a lot they did indeed turn out a lot more stuff a lot but it wasn’t consistent and they shouldn’t they should have they should have taken longer to do it and they should have twisted their arms even harder and we could have had some of this stuff couple of years earlier right okay my that was my conclusion with that is that they Trump was in too much of a hurry to say look what I did and you know he just said get it out I just wanted out is there’s stuff in there that that’s important and everyone finally sort of scratched their head and said yeah some of that stuff still can’t come out and he said okay just you know get it out and then I’ll and then you know we’ll wait a couple of years and look at it again that was the the essence of it now there have been things said about some of these foyer emails Nara Nara emails uh the I don’t think are true I don’t think it’s accurate um there I’ve read a claim that NC the National Security advisor told his guy in NSC to

tell Nara to recommend holding back all of these records he ordered him to do it not true if I if they if it’s in there I wanna I I want I want a citation I want to see it there’s no doubt that they talked to NFC guys about what they’re going to write to president Trump because you have to coordinate if you don’t coordinate it’s like everyone’s saying something different president is very angry guys get your ducks in a row right if there’s a disagreement you have to sit down you send your head honchos in sit down in front of me and talk it out right right so and so there’s there’s no order in there telling them to to recommend to Trump that all these things be held back not true opposite is true NC and Nara are ganging up on the agencies to to twist their arms even harder he said if you guys want to hold back you write your recommendation and we’ll write

ours which is a threat it’s not a threat it’s just a just a statement yeah that you know we’re gonna you know you want you’ll have you will then have to explain to the president why you think we’re

wrong not and remember Trump has already said he wants it out right he wants as much as humanly possible so you’re not and here’s the main guys that are administering this thing and they say we think that can go out and you’re going to argue that it no it can’t to a guy that wants it all out right good luck in the end they they so what happened in the with these email messages it it was I believe that Nara had a strategy though it’s not it’s not stated straight out I think that they said okay they’re redacting way too much they’re holding back way too much so here’s what we’re going to do we’re going to get them to release something from every record no more records withheld in full except for the ones that are mandated by the JFK act and they did it in 2017 and some of it was really just formalism okay so you know they let off one paragraph in a in a in a 200 Page record okay great Le they let out something so we can say right that there are you know no records that are now withheld in full so what um a couple two questions what do you expect in the upcoming releases from Nara and are there any particular documents that you think we uh you’re waiting for that are should that should be interesting a lot of stuff there’s hundreds of pages held back in some FBI records uh there are two kinds of FBI records that have a lot of that have a lot of pages whole page redactions uh one kind is Martin Luther King documents and there’s actually um a Court ruling that sealed those um and it’s it was very puzzling to me that all this ml MLK stuff came out and it turns out that this is a complicated story so I’ll just give a very the this short story is this the church committee went into the FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King in detail and the they got the FBI to submit all kinds of documents and they dragged up FBI agent after FBI agent and grilled them to a crisp and so there’s a ton of this material in the FBI administrated files for the church committee they call it the SSC Senate select committee right right so the FBI SSC theasin file or administrative file was filled with this stuff and for some reason for well for reasons that I I believe it was actually an accident um they they released almost all of those um this is a people didn’t realize this ex until a couple of people who who knew their stuff about FBI MLK looked at it and basically said holy [ __ ] uh they released about 50,000 pages of documents from the SSC file and um big chunks of them thousands and thousands and thousands of pages were on Martin Luther King so uh there some of it was I very sad to read but um the latest Martin Luther King biography written by uh a guy named Jonathan a EIG uh won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for history and uh he uses he uses a lot of this he’s looked at it very carefully right so so that was released and there’s a lot of to me very interesting stuff about the intelligence agencies um there’s a detailed description of sort of the history of the what do they call it the DCd uh domestic contacts division that the FBI put together wow in their documents and so it’s very interesting stuff it’s helpful for background but has absolutely nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination just nothing and the reason and the ARB said we don’t want to release it we don’t we don’t want it in our collection why do we want to dump do a document dump 50,000 pages in our collection which is about a totally different subject and uh I apparently Nar missed those memos instead they found the the finding AIDs that the FBI filled out and they said where are the documents and the FBI said oh well they’re over here well you’re they’re supposed to be here no no they’re not and they said yes they are go get them so they did and they’re still releasing them um this is most of the almost all the FBI documents are like this so so what do you think those 2400 New FBI documents are that that uh we’ve seen in the Press

lately uh I’m sure that they’re field office files they’re field office files I heard I have a great find too I heard that um they uh a lot of them are apparently dollar if they’re Dallas field office files I could easily see how they were duplicates uh I would find it very hard to understand how there could be anything new in there FBI documents FBI files are massively redundant they make no mistake about it it they have to be to be useful I mean otherwise it’s a giant pain in the butt to find things right so I think I if they’re field office files I don’t see how they could be and they’re from Dallas um I I don’t believe that there’s 14,000 pages of new stuff he said 2400 pages that were you know JFK potentially V JFK stuff this already tells you there’s a bunch of Cru in there and uh um 2400 pages of Dallas info what could it be right most people don’t realize how much stuff is in there the the Dallas field office files on JFK assassination were merged into the head headquarters file right headquarters file is over 100,000 pages long um it’s you know it’s the front piece on my blog site you want to see picture the picture yes right right that’s the that’s the that’s the headquarters file on the assassination that’s what 100,000 Pages looks like and so um how could there you know what what manner of material was it that somehow didn’t get looked at okay and is not I mean is not in the field office F the Dallas field office file that was released in full to Nara uh very frustratingly this is so I’m this is answering the second part of your question what do I want to see what do I think is really interesting y I want to see the Dallas field office file yes it’s in the it’s in there but there’s nothing on online it was only very recently when Mary frell the Mary frell Foundation website put up uh I think it was like 3,000 pages of of Dallas field office files on the first five days of the assassination it’s it’s gold it’s the stuff I wanted to read and it it it fills in lots of gaps that people have been saying oh they are hiding this and they’re hiding that another not it’s in the it’s in the field office files it just didn’t get published didn’t get released and that leads to my my question on the fact that that what I’m really interested in is the digitization of the collection which will tell us a lot about the assassination and other details rather than the few documents that have redactions uh this is you know if I were Trump my executive order said you have you have two years to do it I’m going to give you you know I don’t know I don’t care you know 20 million I want it done in two years right that’s that would that would transform our understanding of the history of the assassination um but he didn’t do that because all these people are are yelling about these 2500 records yeah that I mean of the 2500 records how many have whole page redactions I would say about 60 maybe May with the FBI Files you know 65 70 right right and the other 2500 files 2,440 files there I would say at least half of them have only one thing redacted one or two things in the entire F in the entire record one or two what could be there what could it be what could it be that’s so fascinating it might be a couple of people’s names that I would now now I can you know connect a few things I think that Ruben ephron’s name who we’ve you’ve written about before was an example of that on the other hand there was this guy named Phil Heath that wrote uh something for who used to work at the Miami CIA station he wrote this thing for the JFK task force the CIA set up in the 70s and you know his name was released okay so what we already knew that the guy who wrote this what his position was yeah in in in W in the JM wave station we knew we knew who he was we just didn’t know a name and having his name doesn’t doesn’t doesn’t give us anything it’s not not useful right not not not important not important I want to know it yes so okay so my position on this stuff is I want the information but I’m not going to pretend that there’s some deeper significance to it the ARB made its decisions on how to handle this stuff Congress appointed ARB to make these decisions carry out ARB decisions it’s only fair on the other hand if you’re going to hold it back for you know a few more years even 10 years even 20 years fine there’s nothing in there I think is is is that important I could be wrong about some things I’m happy to I would be happy for people to tell me makes it so important but no one is doing that they just say oh there’s there’s there’s important stuff in there I don’t another isn’t one thing isaed one thing is left out what is it is a guy’s name it’s the name of some City it’s the name of some CIA base and some in Germany it’s got to be Ram ramot R what is the a Ramstein right right r I’m struck by the fact that most of a good example would be um on the digitization most of the HSC record hsca records are not online uh Mary Ferell is a great source but a lot of hsca stuff is not there and uh that’s why I always go to narra myself to to Maryland because uh there’s so much there to discover in those files it’s it’s it’s ridiculous hsca is is the main thing and they published probably less than 5% less than 5% of those records are available online that’s ridiculous y so and and so I’ve actually talked to n i written to Nara about this and I saying when are you going to do this when are you g to do this he said well we’re working on we’re working on the Waring commission stuff but when we do going and that’s going slow well this is you know I I I Trump could light a fire under their butts right he says you I mean he could he could tell them you know I want you to prioritize stuff like hsca he could say that right and they’ do it like that and then suddenly you know we would have hundreds of thousands of pages that we’ve never seen before Y and instead they’re wasting their time on this yeah can you trying to twist people’s arm to release the social security numbers of people who aren’t dead yeah so and and and the way they do the digitization you want to comment a bit about the way I mean we have they have a new web page up which has uh uh some of their new digitized records on the Warren Commission uh do you want to comment on that oh it’s it’s I uh Nar is an archive and so archists are very finicky people right they want paper that has only 0.00001% acid so that all their stuff won’t turn yellow and become dust in 10 years I understand this and simplifies with it because I have I bought books in Taiwan that must have been like 10% acid you know they burn your hands and they’re they are dust you know if I try and open them it just kind of you know there’s little sigh and the whole dust dissolves into a the book whole book dissolves into a pile of dust so I understand they’re picky about this and they’ve also been you know people say you they’re hiding stuff what do you mean they’re hiding stuff well they didn’t they didn’t give us scans of the backside of the documents and so what they’re doing with the Waring commission documents is they’re scanning both sides of it now it’s you know it’s only like 1% of these things have anything on the backside so you know half of the stuff they’re scanning is blank pages this is this is annoying then um they’re scanning them using Tiff format which is highly accurate right but uh takes up a lot of space on my hard drive buddy and I have to download it off the internet and that takes even more time and then and then they are taking the they are making these available they are posting these on the website as single pages right they said they’ve scanned like a 100,000 pages of Warren Commission documents you mean I have to download not a file but 100,000 Pages maybe 200,000 if they’re actual pages with both sides 200,000 Pages half of them blank and I have to download them all and then put them into a PDF and run my OCR on it to find out to get an index of this stuff have you asked them about that I I I asked them what well I was asking them you know are you going to do something when are you going to do something about hsca and they said after the warrant commission I you know I I try not to hassle the guy I I’ve only talked written back and forth to a couple of guys I did write to um uh a couple of the people who are overseeing the project um and I got them to they had this one CIA record that was had like four pages four whole page redactions and I wrote to them and said hey the I we have the arb’s you know decision on this thing and it said that they they wanted to release these things and they did release these things and now it’s it’s redacted again and you fix that and they said yeah we we looked at that and said yeah they did it wrong and so they released everything in that in that record which is a lot except for two names so they they take it serious ly right right right and they take this business about um accidentally publishing people Social Security numbers they they take that very seriously and so that’s good I I’ll I suppose I could write to them and say can you guys like hurry up yeah we don’t have the money we don’t have the people you know we’ll we just have all we have is time yeah I mean I mean thank God the Mary feral Foundation we’ll take the narra documents and then OCR them so at least we can search within them so that is good right right we have to wait for that but it’s just it is frustrating I am happy to see that they did digitize The Garrison recordings yeah yeah that was great um th were so what do you think of those well I have I already have a lot of them that I’ve gotten in the past through uh um through requesting it from Nara so I have a lot of it already there’s a few obious a few I don’t have some of the tapes are not uh very hard to listen to but I listen I listened to one yesterday which I which I also had it’s it’s interesting it’s a tape recording of Jack Martin and this is this is right before the uh NBC program uh which criticized Garrison and so this is a tape recording over like four or five phone calls of Jack Martin and he starts off calling up Aaron con head of the Metropolitan crime Commission and he says you know I could I he says the NBC people want to talk to me I could blow Garrison out of the water but what do you think I should do and Aaron con says you know what just tell the truth just go and tell the truth that’s all I can advise you he said yes but if I tell the truth Garrison will come after me and he’s going to ruin me and I need some help and and and con says just tell the truth and then he calls up um his lawyer step Plotkin who also represents Gordon Novel you think I should do should I tell the truth what should I do and Plotkin sort of says yeah you know just just tell the truth and then he calls up um Rick Townley who is a WDSU reporter working on the NBC report and Martin says you know um I’d like to tell you the truth I could blow Garrison out of the water but you know what I have no money and Garrison’s GNA come after me so I need can you guys do something for me and Townley to his credit says you know we can’t pay you that’s our strategy we do not pay people for information and to make a long story short Martin hangs up the phone and then he actually puts a note on the recording I’m trying what I’m trying to do here is I’m trying to coax the NBC people into paying me to prove that they are not honest about this and that’s what I’ve been trying to do here and of course uh so it sort of shows that the NBC people were honest yes right I want to put this online but I have to transcribe um the conversations but it’s pretty it’s it’s pretty it’s a fun one yeah that’s very interesting it it shows that the NBC people knew that Jack Martin is a snake in the grass is what shows yeah and so anyways um but yeah I am looking forward to more of the digitization I I I think let’s I think we should so basically what what are your expectations for what’s going to come from Trump I

I I think that um more stuff is going to come out I think that a lot of these whole page redactions are going to get whittel down um it I mean some of this material is information from other foreign governments and so you really shouldn’t release that unless they say it’s okay right but you know it seems that President Trump doesn’t really care what other foreign governments think and so who knows what could come out in some cases um but I think that he probably wouldn’t release the social security numbers it’s just so unhinged so already that tells you that there’s going to be about 400 records that will still have redaction in and there’s this there’s this problem with the way people treat these records it’s just it’s just it’s not like any they’re not treated like any other archival records They they’re it’s a fallacious approach it’s they they have embedded in them serious research fallacies and I I all I can say is that I I think that um there will still be records redacted even after this go around um but uh it they could they could shrink it more but it’s so irrelevant I I don’t know what to say you know I mean there’s really nothing that I want to see there but I do have okay so I have to have a favorite right that I’m push okay ready yeah okay I want to I want to see uh Lee Harvey oswalt’s 20115 now it’s actually released almost totally in full but they released it in pieces and um there is a complete microfilm copy of the file which has been which has not been released period and the deal was that they’ll release that after the individual pieces have all been released right that was the that was the thing so they don’t have to waste time and energy of you know the of doing these uh how doing these dou releases right right and I think at this point there’s so little left on in the Oswald file uh that’s redacted right there are may be 25 records 25 records I mean like Pages 25 pages that have like one or two redactions one or two words right so good enough just release the whole thing thing that’s about 30,000 Pages 25 30,000 pages and it will all be in one place and you’ll be able to sit down and read it like a book right right and that would be I think perhaps one of the most interesting things in the collection now you even that is you know interesting to who now that I’ve spent all this time learning about this stuff it’d be very interesting to me and so I’m selfish in these things and of course there is uh a bunch of stuff of of Interest that’s outside of the collection uh now they there there’s been um there’s stuff that NRA actually has right that people have donated to them or they have you know picked up some way or another and it would be very nice indeed to see all that online that would be great but here’s the question so you mentioned the 2400 Pages 2400 FBI records or whatever um and I and I said I don’t think there’s going to be very much stuff in there that’s new at least maybe they belong in the collection maybe they don’t right you have to look at them please don’t just throw them in there because they’re saying oh there’s some kind of stuff that it showed up you know we did a new digital registry of our records and this showed up in in our search and so we’re not even gonna review it we’re just going to publish it oh my God please don’t do that I mean archival collections need to be selected right if they’re not selective they’re worthless they’re just giant piles of paper why are you making me go through these piles of paper I want you to go through these piles of paper and then give me the stuff that’s relevant forget about important

relevant yeah so I I my question is is there stuff that’s in other places in other agencies in CIA you know archive in Warrington that is you know relevant and that we you know that they can somehow go in and pull it up I don’t I I don’t 100% deny it but I think that uh some of the stuff is just not so would have to be an Act Congress to get a release of let’s say the RFK material on Cuba at the JFK Library I think most of that a lot of that is out but I I can’t I can’t be 100% sure I don’t know about that there’s other stuff B there’s other places besides the JF FK collection The Arc that has JFK material the JFK library has lots of JFK material it’s not in the collection but some of it could I mean if if this stuff about wave is relevant there’s a lot of stuff in the JFK Library that’s relevant they just didn’t stuff it in the collection if you read um Don Bon’s book yeah he got he got a lot of NSC material from the LBJ Library it’s not in the JFK collection is it relevant well it’s about it’s certainly about you know the the Mongoose and and these other issues Yeah by way that’s a very good book his book is terrific oh yeah that’s a great book and he found this stuff and it’s there and so the JFK collection is not an excuse to not research anywhere else it’s not and it you have to know how to use it right and it h you have to it has to be well Chosen and it’s like people don’t just give us the records and will will go over them uh oh please give me a break you have no idea what what’s involved in this what do you you know it’s just crazy some of this stuff and a lot of this stuff is mythical I’ll I’ll be blunt mythical so for

example uh Bill Harvey’s travel records this just really bothers me um this this claim that that Harvey traveled from took a plane from Rome to

Dallas it come it doesn’t come and supposedly it’s from Mark Wyatt right is that the story I believe that’s the story it’s from a CIA gay CIA guy in Rome who accidentally ran into Harvey on the airplane and um his daughter said that doesn’t sound right where does this story come from this comes from from BREC

calie okay that’s you know that’s it as far as I’m concerned I don’t you know I he’s I’ve read some of his stuff I you know no right no no I I don’t I don’t I don’t think it’s right I don’t think it’s correct I think it’s you know some some stuff I I won’t he’s he’s deceased so I can slander him but I I don’t know all I know is that I don’t find his stuff reliable and that leads to the fact that there is sort of a some conspir come some uh researchers are really after a fishing Expedition ah well there’s a there’s a there’s a story behind some of this so that like some of this material that I clearly has nothing to do with the assassination but it does have to do with CIA misdeeds or FBI misdeeds and you can think of it this way that because JFK was assassinated and didn’t get to fill out his term and carry out his the promise of his presidency so we have things the bad terrible things that happened later and these records of CIA and FBI misdeeds are relevant because they show us how bad things got I think that’s putting it sort of uh what can I say you know I’m trying to put it rationally right right and it’s so easy but it’s easy for people to say oh you know um Eladio delal I mean he was he was involved in the assassination so we need his 2011 file well you know there’s no evidence that he was involved so but yeah you want the 2011 file but that does that mean the CIA has to release it just because you think it’s it’s relevant right right I think that’s absurd I think that’s absurd I mean you you know why based on what do you think that he’s relevant now some people might say no it’s it’s relevant I think David Kaiser said that’s that’s relevant I think that’s relevant I don’t know what to say yeah yeah could there be a permanent should there be a permanent body which judges whether or not this stuff should be released this is something that I I find to be I mean a permanent

right then there’s no end to it this is not this has nothing to do with the JFK act yeah it doesn’t invis it envisions no such thing there will always in a hundred years people will still be coming up with more things they want to see that’s right yeah it it’s never ending I have a solution okay okay it’s the Ripple option okay here’s what you do close down the CIA close down all intelligence agencies then release every piece of paper that they have in their in their files so that they won’t be producing more of this stuff and we eventually have a chance to go through it all why do I call this the Ripley option what did Ripley say when the aliens got out of control on the planet and took over all the and ate all the colonists and we getting ready to eat them she said I think we should take the spaceship back up into orbit and nuke the planet it’s the only way to be

sure well thank you for that

solution it’s a great way to end this seriously it’s not serious it’s a joke it’s a joke any parting comments before we go it’s been fascinating talking to you it’s really really interesting uh yeah I I I I’ve had a great a great time talking to you I feel like I you know you you know so much about some of this stuff also that it’s very it’s very helpful to me and uh I’d like to just say one more time y i I really hope that people will try and look at what’s left that’s not available I mean you can find it it’s not that hard do it yourself okay this this this idea that there’s a vast Trove of material still in there is just wrong so recalibrate you know for the researchers recalibrate your approach and focus on the stuff that You’ got which is really a lot I mean it’s a lot just the stuff online at Mary frell at Nara it’s a it’s huge quantities of things and you can really do interesting stuff with it right and I would say for a lot of researchers um go to Nara there’s there’s all sorts of stuff there that’s not online that is fully public that you can go and research and find out about right yeah so I think that trying to get if people can focus on that I think that that would be a very positive development on the other hand I think that you know instead of worrying so much about this really really small amount of stuff that’s left if if you know they could focus more on getting the stuff online yeah it would be a tremendous boom to research you know regardless of what you think about you know the the assassination itself of the events of the assassination the history of the assassination would be vastly enriched by putting this material online yeah I totally agree that’s what I’m waiting for well thank you very much Robert and I’m sure we’ll be talking to you another uh couple of weeks or months when after the after the stuff comes out so uh stay tuned my fingers crossed yeah okay thank you very much